


Love Letters

by tangentti



Category: A Memory Called Empire - Arkady Martine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-27 02:40:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21111326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tangentti/pseuds/tangentti
Summary: Sealed in wax, crossed in transit.





	Love Letters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Merit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merit/gifts).

**Second Undersecretary Three Seagrass:**  
How do I miss you, let me count the ways - that is the fixed idiom for starting an ode, yet I already drop into prose. Tell me, muse, of the ambassador of nested dolls, and her complicated journey home - better, if I frame you as inspiration and audience. Call me Mahit Dzmare - ah, but that is Lsel literature and not Teixcaalan poetry. Three false starts, now for the true.

  
_Truly Sorry/Fault is Ours/ Urgent Call to Frontier/All Passengers Debark._  
When the announcement came ringing through the ship, staccato rap, I could not help but laugh out loud. My predecessor, murdered at dinner, my fingers, still blistered from toxic and beautiful flowers, my back still strained from wrestling with a soldier with a poisoned thorn, and the faint burning in my feet from experimental neurosurgery, and this was to be One Lightning’s contribution to petty vengeance, stealing my transport out from under me with priority orders. Who could I blame but myself, turning the fleet aside from my home with but words and the smile of my cultural liason?

  
_Labyrinth of Night/The House of Masks/Falling Free/One Grain of Sand_  
Asteroids make interesting living spaces, especially rubble piles of chondritic rock, and the shuttle took us to no planet but a worm-eaten sphere, the technologies of space oozing into crevices, levering apart boulders into a complex maze of corridors and rooms of no regular shape. Here, I was short, compared to the adapted residents, as no spin can be put on the loosely coupled structure, everyone operates without gravity. The customs official, gloves and foot-gloves, greeted us, eyes averted, face cowled in fabric - here, to show a naked face is to be rude, and all wear masks. It seemed to be a quiet resistance to the Teixcaalan way, to play an explicit role in public, drawn from literature, teleplays, epics, but placed externally, separate to one’s own mind. You will guess my mask: the long suffering One Quartz, apparently bumpkin ambassador from nowhere who is always at the center of conspiracies, nicknamed Sand. It bore a suspicious resemblance to a caricature of Ysandr’s face, when I looked into a mirror.

  
_Harmonies of Light/Coincidences of Dark/Echos of Music/Reflections on Silence_  
If you randomly travel in any direction, the odds of encountering anything at all in the universe are vanishingly small. Gravity and will focus us into common orbits. Being surrounded by walls keeping out the emptiness, it drove home how I trusted you before I knew I loved you. Any unexpected draft of air puts a spacer on edge, but in the sunlit quad where we saw a bit of your student past, I saw you sleeping, and trusted the air would be there when we woke up.

  
_Pilots in Port/Ships in Space/Cash in Hand/No Questions_  
Shall I, who recall another life in which I loved now two emperors, be put out by having my important vessel taken away? Or am I a young woman of Lsel who does what is needed? Inward bound osmium from Lsel space, outward bound flowers for sandwiches. The pilot, a rough youngster from a line of bold pilots, One Porcelain, and her free fall adapted copilot, had wanted for nothing in their lives except to smuggle a person of mystery away. It is one of your people’s strengths, my love, the ability to be the instant participant in any story, turning your clothes inside out to pass in a new role once the old is not needed.

**Ambassador of Lsel Mahit Dzmare:**  
_Ma_, a questioning word or an answer in the first syllable, once one steps from the role of a lowly cultural liason into an exalted role such as I now play, new friends appear as old friends leave, although none can replace you.  
_Hit_, a sharp word, bold tastes and the points of knives. Goereth, clothed in silk, teeth sharpened, sought me for advice on bringing algorithms into the City, new mathematics to fix buzzing glitches.  
_Dz_, an unnatural sound, only in the middle of words, a transition between one syllable and another, slurred. Drunk in daylight, depressed by night, if I were seduced by one tall barbarian, could I not be caught by another?  
_Ma_, this tone shifts to a confirmation, or double-negation. The grass was green, and I was exhausted, battered, and you stood guard as I slept. Trust is love, and you wrapped me in it.  
_Re_, blood, at the end of a word as at the end of life, sun, alone in a sentence as it is alone in the sky. I held your hand, my proud barbarian, after you had killed a man, not for yourself, but for another. You held me as I wept to see a new emperor bloodily born.  
_Caesura_, a pause at the end, silence waiting for an answer, full of potential.


End file.
